When teachers try to integrate the arts — music, visual art, creative writing, dance, etc. — in their classrooms, they risk sacrificing academic content, warns Susan Barber on Edutopia. She suggests five guidelines to prevent arts integration from becoming just arts and crafts.

Teachers can find arts-integration lessons with an academic focus that are aligned to Common Core standards at sites such as the Getty, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Kennedy Center, Barber suggests.

One of the few signs of progress in changing the debate in education had been a concerted rejection of the most obviously pseudo-scientific parts of the education climate, namely Brain Gym and learning styles. The greater involvement of cognitive psychologists in education, (e.g. Dweck and Willingham), challenges from outside education (e.g. Goldacre) , the creation of ResearchED and the opening up of debate on social media had helped create a climate where these most obvious frauds could not hope to…

Fifth graders sketched designs for “Rube Goldberg machines” that would turn on and off lights or feed a pet fish. Each team member “spent a few minutes sketching out how one part — a marble run, say, or a Lego Robotics kicking foot — would operate within the machine,” then handed it off to the next person, who’d design the next step, writes Chris Berdik for the Hechinger Report.

Each fifth grader designs one part of a Rube Goldberg machine. Credit: Chris Berdik

In the affluent Pittsburgh suburb of South Fayette, “computational thinking” is integrated into every grade and class.

At a Harlem elementary school, children are asked to come up with a question and use the Internet to find the answer, reports NPR. Sugata Mitra, a British education technology professor known for giving street kids access to a “hole-in-the-wall” computer in India, developed SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environments).

MITRA: You’re going to work with these six computers; the question is, why do dogs chase cats? And, of course, you can talk as much as you like, you can walk around, you can move, you can look at other people’s work. You can do whatever you like.

In one of his last acts as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott and his Minister for Education Chris Pyne appointed one of their mates from big business to review how schools were funded. He brought to the review his experience of attending one of Sydney’s most expensive grammar schools and being Chairman of the Board of Trustees there. He’s a good friend of Rupert Murdoch though, and owns a house worth over $5 million (and sold a penthouse for $14 million). A real battler for the disadvantaged.

Unsurprisingly the review he just handed down entrenched strong funding for the sort of private schools he…

Originally posted on Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

From time to time, a few readers ask me how I, as a historian of education, go about collecting and analyzing data about teachers at work in classrooms especially those who have taught many decades ago and those who teach now. In my next book, Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools, I reconstructed how I taught history at Glenville High School in Cleveland (OH) and Cardozo High School (Washington, D.C.) in the 1950s and…